What is Audio UX?
LOS ANGELES, Calif, April 5, 2025
Let’s start with what it isn’t…
A quick web search for “audio user experience” turns up a number of sites that discuss the role of sound, or more specifically sounds, in the user experience. Sounds for interactions. Sounds that play when you click on buttons. Sounds for logos.
It’s Not Audio UI
The Audio User Experience includes those, but it is more than designing sounds that play when you interact with a virtual object or an interface.
It’s Not Audio Branding
A great Audio User Experience is an important part of elevating your brand, but it is more than designing Audio Logos.
It’s Not Sound Design
Designing great sounds is part of creating an effective Audio User Experience, but it is more than the sounds themselves.
It’s Not A Nice-To-Have
Whether or not you design the Audio UX with intention, the choices that get made in the rest of the UX have an impact on the Audio User Experience. It is integral to the user experience, more so in spatial computing.
It’s The Way It Sounds
Audio User Experience design encapsulates why sounds play, how they play, where they play, and how those sounds interact with other sounds.
It combines thinking how audio input, usually voice, plays a role in the experience as well as output.
It’s how visuals, interactivity, and sound all work together.
It’s systems and the implementation of those systems.
It’s how everything fits together.
It’s how things sound moment to moment.
It’s solving user problems with sound, not just sounds.
It’s helps craft presence and deepen immersion while supporting user agency in spatial UX.
